1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of inbox management for messaging systems and more particularly to threaded messages views of an inbox.
2. Description of the Related Art
Electronic messaging represents the single most useful task accomplished over wide-scale computer communications networks. Some argue that in the absence of electronic messaging, the Internet would have amounted to little more than a science experiment. Today, electronic messaging seems to have replaced the ubiquitous telephone and fax machine for the most routine of interpersonal communications. As such, a variety of electronic messaging systems have arisen which range from real-time instant messaging systems and wireless text pagers to asynchronous electronic mail systems.
Electronic mail, a form of electronic messaging referred to in the art as e-mail, has proven to be the most widely used computing application globally. Though e-mail has been a commercial staple for several decades, due to the explosive popularity and global connectivity of the Internet, e-mail has become the preferred mode of communications, regardless of the geographic separation of communicating parties. Today, more e-mails are processed in a single hour than phone calls. Clearly, e-mail as a mode of communications has been postured to replace all other modes of communications, save for voice telephony.
An inbox generally provides for the receipt, classification, storage, and handling of incoming messages. As messages are received, each received message can be viewed and handled according to the preferences of the end user. In most cases, a message can be deleted, stored in a folder, forwarded to a different person or persons, or replied to the sender and optionally any other recipients of the message. Where a single message has been replied to or forwarded repeatedly by and to different parties to the message, a message thread is generated wherein each transmitted message is viewed as a member of the thread. To that end, a message thread can be a messaging analog of a conversation.
Message threads when limited in the number of messages can be extraordinarily helpful in permitting different readers to gain a quick understanding of the flow of a virtual conversation. However, over time, the volume of messages in a message thread can become substantial and older messages in the message thread can become stale. Further, to the extent that later postings to the message thread include “history” of other messages in the thread, content in the message thread can be stored in duplicate, triplicate and so forth. Specifically, each message in the message thread represents a single response to a prior message in the thread. However, each message in the message thread can include under certain circumstances that result most often from the directive “Reply with History” the content of other messages in the message thread.
Thus, significant computing resources can be consumed in storing message content repetitively and unnecessarily, including disk space, processor time in loading the stored content of the message thread into dynamic memory, and of course the dynamic memory itself. The problem can be compounded when messages in the message thread include attachments of some size. The duplication of messages with attachments in a message thread can result in exponentially greater consumption of computing resources.